About

Tuesday, 11 November 2008

My thoughts on e-learning and F2F learning

This is my first e-course on Moodle and I really enjoy the challenge of studying in a totally different environment. Using Internet technology is fast and so many different activities such as blogs, wikis, podcasts and videos can be created and used by the teacher all in one place. It is a much more time-effective medium of instruction and a lot of ideas can be easily shared straight from the Internet.

The development of Second Life in the last few years has revolutionised the way technology is used as a teaching medium and the notion of a virtual classroom is definitely here to stay. I have seen e-courses advertised in many places and the idea of being able to study within your own home environment is naturally very appealing to a lot of learners. I can speak from my own experience now and I can honestly say that e-learning is an excellent way of studying. There is a lot of background support via e-mails, moodle blogs and Skype chatting which is very important and highly effective.

F2F teaching and learning has many advantages of course. The buzz you get from direct contact I suppose is one of the features that technology can't ever fully replace. I agree that possibly teaching via Skype could be as close as you can get to being in front of someone and video-linking also has been used very successfully to link students and teachers from all over the world. However, F2F is a more emotionally challenging and direct way of imparting knowledge and I do hope that there will always be a place in society for what could very soon become an old-fashioned style of teaching and learning. I have always taught F2F but I think it's maybe time for me to move on to a different level of teaching...